Another financial year has ticked over. Like many small businesses I’m stuck in the jam of doing a stocktake and reviewing my product and labour prices. It’s been a weird 6 months, reminiscent of the early Covid period, where business and consumer confidence plummeted, leading to much speculation ranging from a global financial collapse to an oil crisis ‘bike boom’ (good luck with that!). However things play out, I tend to avoid reading too much into the daily news cycle and the so-called poly- or permacrisis that we seem to be living in. If I have any business strategy it’s not ambitious… more of a motto.
- Do good work
- Don’t go into into debt.
In case you were wondering, I don’t count every spoke and nipple during stocktake.
The first 4 months of 2026 were amongst the busiest and toughest I’d experienced in a long time. This wasn’t due to any massive boom or decline in my work, but the changing reality of my daily-weekly schedule. In January I cut back my work hours to 3 days a week (Monday, Friday, Saturday) so I could tag-team the other days with the kids while my partner was at work. January was also one of the busiest periods we’ve have with online shop sales. Not a bad problem to have. However, with reduced hours and lots of online orders to fulfil, I had very little time for wheel building and repairs. I was effectively “banking” a heap of new jobs for the following month, with the hope that I’d get to it sooner or later once I returned to full time hours. February kicked in and my older son started high school at a different school to his younger brother. I was now doing a double drop-off and pickup routine getting to work just before 9am and closing at 3pm or earlier on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. My “shop hours” had been reduced by 5-6 hours a week, however I was no longer able to do discretionary overtime, where I’d start early or finish late just too “get it done’. The culmination of these two dynamics, meant that my wait times exploded by up to two months. In March I stopped accepting new work for the entire month so I could catch up. It was only in late May that I started to find a happy-medium with turn-around times around 1 month for wheel builds and 1-2 weeks for repairs. So in summary, I can’t do as much as I have in previous years. I am fortunate to be in the position where I can reduce my work hours.
It’s now the July school holidays and I’ll be returning to a three day a week (Monday, Friday, Saturday) for the next two weeks. As its peak winter rainy season, I’m not expecting to be overloaded as much as I was in January, but I’ll need to finish stocktake first.
PS. If you’re still reading, well done. Please note that on Thursday 9 July the Spartan Cycling Club will be hosting a Tour De France screening at The Local Hotel in Fremantle. Event details are on facebook here.
Photo credit: Tony Lendrum, Numbat Cup 2026